We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The management and communication during the epidemic has been plagued by misleading statistics, the cherry-picking of the worst data, alarmist language, horror-film-style advertising, one-sided media coverage and coercive language and tactics, all of which I wrote about in my new book, A State of Fear.
Bludgeoning people with ‘nudge’ (behavioural psychology), weaponising fear, and tightly controlling the narrative risk undermining the public’s trust in government, public-health messaging and the media. This is the third time I have reported on anti-lockdown protests for spiked, and the third time I have been slack-jawed by the lack of honesty in how the media misrepresents the scale and purpose of these protests. This mistrust can be read clearly in the placards.
– Laura Dodsworth
My prediction: BBC will highlight the vastly smaller anti-Israel protest elsewhere in London rather than this anti-lockdown protest (assuming they even report it at all).
→ Continue reading: Anti-lockdown protest in London
Epic 🤣
A couple I have not seen before…
When people see those anti-lockdown memes being spread, it forces them to recognize that the world isn’t quite as monolithic as their approved media lulls them into thinking it is. The more they encounter, the more often they must recognize that their paradigms aren’t universal.
In a healthy society, it would be apparent that there were dissenting views. In a society that quashes “disinformation”, you need illicit memes to remind people that there are other views.
– Bobby B
This is a post about propaganda. But I am not using that word in its negative sense, but rather as a neutral technical term. Yes, yes, as it happens I pretty much agree with the sentiments being expressed by the slogans below. But this is really just me marvelling at what good sloganeers the people behind these are.
These slogans started appeared in early 2021, at least that is when I started noticing them popping up around London. And they have been steadily and tirelessly appearing every day ever since, pretty much all over town, at least the Central London parts I tend to visit (Kennington & Chelsea, Notting Hill, West End, Battersea, Wapping).
I am a sloganeer myself, and this is really just an admiring post about pithy propaganda. So, if that is not what you are going to comment about below… don’t. This post is not about anything else.
Feel like helping out? Go here!
→ Continue reading: The power of pithy propaganda
In an earlier posting here just after Christmas, I solicited compliments, to cheer me up after I’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. Commenters on that posting said nice things about my blogging here over the years, and I thanked them. But older friends and acquaintances, who had been sent an email with the same news of my probably much shortened lifespan, remembered an earlier time in my life, from about 1980 to 2000, during which I was a libertarian activist and pamphleteer. Since this was before the arrival of the Internet, the key items of technology, in addition to the then still primitive but fast developing personal computer was, rather surprisingly, the photocopier. But there was another circumstance, mentioned by many friends, which was of far greater importance to me than any personal computer or photocopier. That circumstance was an individual human being, Chris Tame:
That is a photo of Chris Tame that I recently chanced upon in the vast accumulation of more or less meaningless paper that passes for my filing system.
Three years after Chris Tame died in 2006, I did a talk about his influence and legacy, about how much of a difference Chris Tame made, to all the libertarians whom he got in touch with and whom he put in touch with each other from his 1980s nerve centre at the Alternative Bookshop and then on into the 1990s. Here and now, I want to emphasise what a difference Chris made to me personally. Had it not been for Chris I would probably not have bothered being any sort of active libertarian at all, because without him that would have been just too difficult. Now that I am asking people to praise me, I realise that I want to praise Chris, publicly and in writing and at quite some length, far more than I have yet praised him before.
→ Continue reading: Chris Tame (1949-2006): A personal memoir
If you find yourself moved to attend a public protest in the UK, but are not a member of a group that your local Plod choose to kneel in support of, might I suggest you protect yourself, because it is likely violent thugs may decide your protest is unwanted.
A good way to do this is by attending future protests with a good (but generic) motorbike helmet (which also means you are wearing a ‘face covering’, for Covid-19, you understand) and stout boots to protect your feet. Full biker leathers (also generic and unadorned) are optional but also have much to commend them, and these can be armoured and reinforced in all sorts of way.
No, not us at Samizdata. While I can say with pride that I am a libertarian, with sorrow that my sect is tiny, and with one of those sorrynotsorry voices that I have been known to be a provocateur, neither I nor anyone else at Samizdata has ever reached a position where the Guardian could credibly accuse us of secretly controlling the Conservative Party. The Revolutionary Communist Party has.
Andy Beckett’s Guardian article, “Why Boris Johnson’s Tories fell for a tiny sect of libertarian provocateurs”, is a genuinely interesting account of this strange tale of political transformation. My goodness, though, those commenters are cross.
The progress to sanity* of former RCP/Living Marxism stalwarts such as Munira Mirza, Claire Fox, Frank Furedi, Mick Hume and Brendan O’Neill was observed at an earlier stage by Brian Micklewthwait in this post from 2003.
*Well, most of the way to sanity. Best not to mention Serbia.
The “Black Lives Matter” movement took yet another black life on Saturday. Eight-year-old Secoriea Turner was murdered when ‘Black Lives Matter’ activists shot up the car she was in after its driver had the misfortune to exit the interstate near one of their barriers.
If they order you to take the knee, stand up. Stand up for Secoriea; don’t kneel to her murderers. Honour Secoriea Turner, who was 8 and did no harm; don’t honour George Floyd, who thrust his gun into the stomach of a pregnant black woman during a home invasion.
I could say a great deal more – but if you or I are ever in that position, the narrative’s finger will be poised over the ‘Cancel’ button. So I advise thinking about what brief words you will say, when they tell you to kneel to a bunch of murderers and you suspect the next words you utter might be the last they’ll let anyone hear in the public domain.
Seen on a wall in Prague earlier today. Powerful, because most of us do indeed know who Dr. Li Wenliang is, or rather… was.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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